Oct 26 2025
In Rituale — Rituals to give the book its English title — Cees Nooteboom begins in the middle, goes back to the beginning, and then skips a bit to get to something of an ending. As middle beginnings that might well be endings go, the first sentence in Rituals is arresting: “On the day that Inni …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/26/rituale-by-cees-nooteboom/
Sep 27 2025
No Longer at Ease follow Things Fall Apart a generation later, although that is not immediately apparent. What is immediately apparent is that Obi Okonkwo is in a heap of trouble. He is in the dock, on trial in a case that has been the talk of Lagos for weeks, and the only thing remaining …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/27/no-longer-at-ease-by-chinua-achebe/
Sep 06 2025
Ivan Vladislavić paints his Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked in a pointillist style, dividing up not quite 200 pages of main text into 138 anecdotes and observations, each of which shows some aspect of his life in the city in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The sections are numbered, enabling the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/06/portrait-with-keys-by-ivan-vladislavic/
Oct 03 2023
In early 2004, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s leading daily newspapers, began a new venture: publishing hardcover books. They began with a worthy and ambitious set of 50 great novels of the twentieth century, published one per week through to February 2005, when the series concluded with If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler… …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/03/suddeutsche-series/
May 27 2022
In Softcore a first-person narrator, annoyingly also named Tirday Zolghadr, relates the weeks and days before the opening of a new and arty nightclub in contemporary Tehran, interspersed with his remembrances of earlier times in and around Iran’s capital city. The book has some funny bits, such as a running gag about the splittist tendencies …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/27/softcore-by-tirdad-zolghadr/
May 13 2022
Das Haus an der Moskwa, known in English as The House on the Embankment and with the original title Дом на набережной, poses a question that it doesn’t really answer, or at least not directly. On a hot August day in 1972 Vadim Glebow has traveled out to a distant corner of Moscow to get …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/13/das-haus-an-der-moskwa-by-yuri-trifonov/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire